Aesthetic Maintenance of Civic Space

Download or read book Aesthetic Maintenance of Civic Space written by Ine Jacobs and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Roman period the construction and maintenance of civic infrastructure and monuments, such as bath buildings, theatres, fountains, arches, statues and so on were regarded as the normal duty of well-off citizens, who constituted the local government. For the subsequent period, encompassing the 4th to the 7th century AD, it has long been assumed that changing social and political conditions within the Roman Empire resulted in a severe reduction of expenditure and concurrent loss of sentimental and aesthetic attitudes towards public space. This book challenges this assumption. It assesses the care still given to monuments and public space in the cities in the Eastern Mediterranean, reconstructs how the city represented itself, and focuses on the protagonists in this field. First, it evaluates the diverse initiators of interventions and their motivation. Second, the skills of the actual constructors are looked into in order to judge their identity and number. Third, the priorities of the viewers and use of public space.